Lex Fridman Podcast

Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch | Lex Fridman Podcast #114

Russ Tedrake is a roboticist and professor at MIT and vice president of robotics research at TRI. He works on control of robots in interesting, complicated, underactuated, stochastic, difficult to model situations. Support this podcast by supporting our sponsors. Click links, get discount: - Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex link & using code LEX at checkout - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex - ExpressVPN at https://www.expressvpn.com/lexpod EPISODE LINKS: Russ's Website: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/russt.html Russ's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1CtAHVea8I TRI: https://www.tri.global/team/dr-russ-tedrake Underactuated Robotics: http://underactuated.mit.edu Drake: https://drake.mit.edu PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41 OUTLINE: 0:00 - Introduction 4:29 - Passive dynamic walking 9:40 - Animal movement 13:34 - Control vs Dynamics 15:49 - Bipedal walking 20:56 - Running barefoot 33:01 - Think rigorously with machine learning 44:05 - DARPA Robotics Challenge 1:07:14 - When will a robot become UFC champion 1:18:32 - Black Mirror Robot Dog 1:34:01 - Robot control 1:47:00 - Simulating robots 2:00:33 - Home robotics 2:03:40 - Soft robotics 2:07:25 - Underactuated robotics 2:20:42 - Touch 2:28:55 - Book recommendations 2:40:08 - Advice to young people 2:44:20 - Meaning of life CONNECT: - Subscribe to this YouTube channel - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

Lex FridmanhostRuss Tedrakeguest

Aug 9, 20202h 48mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Let Physics Work: Russ Tedrake on Robots, Control, and Touch

Lex Fridman and MIT roboticist Russ Tedrake explore how control theory, dynamics, and contact shape the behavior of both robots and animals, from passive dynamic walkers to fish surfing vortices and humans running barefoot.
They dig into underactuated robotics—systems with more degrees of freedom than actuators—and why embracing, rather than fighting, physics leads to more elegant, robust, and efficient robot behavior.
Tedrake recounts lessons from the DARPA Robotics Challenge, the difficulty of contact-rich manipulation and simulation, and the role of deep learning versus rigorous mathematical thinking in robotics.
The conversation closes with discussion of soft robotics, tactile sensing, home robots for elder care, societal fears about robots, and advice for young people on thinking deeply and building things that matter.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Leverage physics instead of fighting it.

Passive dynamic walkers and trout surfing vortices show that if you design mechanics well and stop trying to cancel out the world with motors and control, you can get stable, natural, and efficient motion with minimal actuation.

Underactuated systems demand optimization and careful control design.

Most real systems, including humans, have more degrees of freedom than actuators; optimal control and trajectory optimization let you exploit these dynamics rather than pretend everything is fully actuated and simple.

Contact is both essential and computationally hard.

Making and breaking contact introduces discontinuities and combinatorial explosion in possible contact configurations, which breaks many classic smooth-control assumptions and makes both simulation and planning for manipulation fundamentally challenging.

Rigorous thinking still matters in the age of deep learning.

While deep learning enables fast progress, Tedrake argues that clear mathematical models, analysis, and classical control tools are irreplaceable for safety-critical, complex robotic systems and to avoid over-relying on black-box function approximators.

Robust robotics requires disciplined testing and rare-event search.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge revealed that you cannot simply run a single robot more often; you need systematic testing, unit and integration tests, good simulators, and active methods to expose rare but catastrophic failure modes.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

Maybe instead of trying to take the forces imparted to you by the world and replacing them, what we should be doing is letting the world push us around and we go with the flow.

— Russ Tedrake

What if Newton and Galileo had deep learning and just said, ‘Here are the weights of the neural network’? I don’t think we’d be as far as we are today.

— Russ Tedrake

The world gives us underactuated robots, whether we like it or not.

— Russ Tedrake

We’re building robots wrong. Robots are afraid of touching the world all over their body.

— Russ Tedrake

What a luxury to have something that you want to spend all your time on.

— Russ Tedrake

Passive dynamic walking and energy-efficient animal and robot locomotionUnderactuated robotics, control theory, and optimal controlContact dynamics, manipulation, and the difficulty of simulating touchLessons from the DARPA Robotics Challenge and robust testingBarefoot running, biomechanics, and learning efficient movementSoft robotics, tactile sensing, and human-robot physical interactionAI, deep learning, fleet learning, and the future of home and humanoid robots

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